Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel Review

If you’re also a PC gamer then you probably have heard of the Fallout games before. Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the Cold War turned hot in the 1950s, the Fallout series has spawned several well-regarded RPGs and a squad-based strategy game. The series now makes its console debut as an action-RPG built on the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance engine in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. With a pedigree that includes a venerated PC series of games and the engine of an excellent action-RPG game you’d think that Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (BoS) would be destined to be one of the top console games of the year. I thought so too. After playing BoS though, I was soon disappointed to find that it is a thoroughly average game.

BoS casts you in the role of a wasteland mercenary who’s recently joined the legendary Brotherhood of Steel. The Brotherhood is a society dedicated to bringing order back to the wasteland basically by killing anyone or thing that causes trouble. Unfortunately you’ve lost your fellow Brotherhood warriors and your quest to track them down forms the core of the game’s story.

Before play begins, you have your choice of playing as a big bruiser named Cyrus, a quick but weak woman named Nadia, and a mutant named Cain who’s not as fast as Nadia but stronger and not as strong as Cyrus but faster. Cyrus is your melee and heavy weapons guy, while Nadia is better suited to those who prefer to conduct their killing at a distance behind the safety of a gun while eluding direct confrontations. The mutant is a middle of the road character who has the advantage of not only being immune to the ubiquitous puddles of radioactive waste found in the wasteland of the future, but of being able to regenerate health from the ooze.

If you’ve played Dark Alliance, then you’ll be able to pick up BoS and start playing right away. The game shares Dark Alliance’s control scheme (with a few modifications), which is a good thing because it works pretty well. You cycle between your equipped weapons with the Black and White buttons and attack with B. This allows you to quickly switch weapons so you can blast away at an enemy with a shotgun, and then switch to a club when it gets closer. Using a stimpack (the futuristic equivalent of a health potion) is a trigger pull away, and the other trigger can be used to lock onto a target when shooting. There are also buttons used to jump and crouch, the former of which you’ll need to use a lot and the latter never at all. However there is a major difference in control between Dark Alliance and BoS, when you use the right stick to move the camera you’ll find that unlike Dark Alliance you can not zoom the camera or change its angle. Throughout the game the camera is locked in an awkward high angle that is almost a straight overhead view. This can make it difficult to get a good view of the action at times, especially in close quarters. It also makes it hard to view some of the details in the game – for example, billboards touting a certain energy drink whose manufacturer apparently survived the nuclear holocaust intact are somewhat hard to read.

Like Dark Alliance, BoS is primarily focused on the action of slaying enemies and monsters. Some RPG elements are retained, such as your character earning experience and gaining levels. When you gain a level, you earn points that can be spent to select new skills (called perks in the game) or improve on existing ones. The perks in BoS include bonuses to weapon range, healing, and critical hit chance.  Overall, the perks cover the basics of increasing your attack and defensive power and total health, but there are no really interesting or powerful skills or abilities to shoot for which takes some of the excitement out of leveling up.

The other major RPG element found in BoS is NPC interaction. You’ll need to converse with various characters that you encounter in the game to advance the storyline and to receive quests. However, the interaction is limited to listening to the character speak and then selecting a response. The conversations are not branching, so it doesn’t matter too much which response that you select and you’ll eventually hear everything that you need to hear. The NPC conversations in BoS are crude and peppered with obscenities. The problem is not so much that the conversations include obscenities, this is an M-rated game after all, it’s that the obscenities are not used very creatively. The Fallout games on the PC were full of wit and clever humor, and there’s little of that here in BoS. Instead, far too often you exchange curse words with an NPC and then you’re off on your next mission.

The lack of imagination found in the game’s conversations extends to the missions you’ll receive in the game. They all involve clearing an area of monsters or enemies and occasionally require you to retrieve an item, but that’s about it. The puzzles are pretty simple, such as finding the right creature to kill to obtain a key to a locked door. Since you pretty much kill everything in sight anyway, there’s not much thinking involved in puzzles like this. Killing hordes of creatures was a lot of fun in Dark Alliance, but more often than not in BoS the combat is repetitive and monotonous. Too many enemies attack by simply running straight at you or by standing in place shooting at you. There are occasional boss battles to add a little variety to the action, but you’ll spend most of your time slaying one type of enemy or another that behaves pretty much the same as the last type of enemy you encountered.

Dark Alliance was built on a simple gameplay design, but could keep you fascinated for hours on end. Something was lost when the game was transferred to the Fallout universe, though. BoS has its moments, but you’ll be quite aware of the repetitive nature of its gameplay while playing it and will only be able to stick to it for short periods of time. A love of Dark Alliance or of Fallout is no guarantee that you’ll enjoy BoS.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 68%.  A lot of the fun got nuked out of Dark Alliance when it was moved to Fallout’s post-apocalyptic future.